Force, Juliana Rieser (1876–1948)

US museum director and art supporter. She promoted the more progressive US painters through her involvement with the Whitney Studio, an art gallery in Greenwich Village. As director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, she continued to encourage avant-garde artists.

She was born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and became a private secretary in New York. Her employer's sister-in-law, the sculptor and art patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, asked Force to help run her Whitney Studio. She helped Whitney in founding the Friends of the Young Artists (1915), which evolved into the Whitney Studio Club (1918), both designed to support the new artists with exhibits, purchases, and social contacts. Whitney was convinced that a museum was needed and the foundation of the Whitney Museum of American Art was announced in 1930. Force continued to expand her support of American artists, helping to organize the federal art programme under the Public Works of Art Project, and heading a 1945 committee that got the New York State legislature to earmark funds to purchase art for public buildings.